Ten days ago, Steelers coach Mike Tomlin said in response to a question about whether he was going to bench starting quarterback Mitchell Trubisky: “Definitely no.”
By the start of the second half on Sunday of Week 4, he had benched Mitchell Trubisky, igniting the Kenny Pickett era that only the naive among us thought would not begin at some point this season. And while it might seem like a strange point to make, Tomlin’s ability to completely obscure his personal feelings and publicly—if not laughably—support a quarterback we all knew was flailing, is why Pickett will love playing quarterback for the Steelers. All of the reasons we called this a perfect fit on draft night remain true.
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Most of the time, we’d have a clinical, psychiatric term reserved for people who can stand up in front of a large crowd and convincingly fabricate the truth (politician! ... just kidding … kind of). But the head coaching role is the rare leadership position where this is a positive attribute, at least from the perspective of the players inside the locker room he’s protecting. Too often coaches care both about their personal security and the feelings of their players, and that can lead to scenarios where podium utterances serve themselves instead of the greater good. Tomlin could care less if he looked silly supporting Trubisky until the bitter end. He could have made one of those uncomfortable monologues of coaching legalese which end up looking so weak and transparent. If there was a chance it made Trubisky feel a little bit better, he was willing to take it.
Back in the spring, during Ben Roethlisberger’s strange post-retirement media tour, he made something resembling noise by saying that neither Tomlin nor then Steelers general manager Kevin Colbert wanted him back in 2022. He also said that his return last year was largely due to his relationship with ownership.
And yet, Tomlin sat idly by throughout what amounted to a lost season, watching Roethlisberger amble backward in the pocket and zip two-yard passes at a maddening rate. If there was any brewing discontent, it didn’t make its way out of the locker room until Big Ben was done playing, and he now depends on saying interesting things to stay in the news. Imagine sitting through that whole 17-game season without picking up the phone, texting an NFL insider and saying, Please report that we know this is terrible and there’s nothing we can do about it. Send help. Andy Dalton. Anything.
We have not seen Tomlin work with a high-profile rookie with the global impact Pickett will have on the franchise before. So far, so good. If the only people who can claim to have been offended are in the press, he’s probably earned bonus points in the locker room.
So much of raising a successful quarterback is about emotional intelligence. You can try the Chargers’ way, which is to lull a rookie into the sense that he’ll be a backup and then incorrectly puncture the starter with a medical needle minutes before kickoff. You can try the Dolphins’ way before Mike McDaniels’s arrival, which involved starting and benching the player constantly, and changing offensive coordinators frequently enough to keep the local office nameplate company in business. You can do it the Jaguars’ way and hire a coach who may or may not kick him during a stretch period, and design plays where his wide receivers smash into one another as some kind of character building-experiment. This would all be funny if it weren’t true.
Tomlin, while not averse to gaffes over his elongated sample size as a head coach, seems to have a better sense of these things, which is why Pickett had to wait until the midway point of Sunday’s Jets game to make his debut. A great deal of thought went into this decision.
Of course, it doesn’t seem that way because a little more than a week ago, Tomlin was doing what he does best, and what he’ll do for Pickett, too. He’ll have someone’s back. He’ll put himself out there. He’ll do what’s in the best interest of a team.
New coaches will argue that it takes winning a Super Bowl and being with an organization like Pittsburgh’s to have the type of job security where someone can act this way. But as we watch Pickett grow, it may just be an argument for reverse-engineering the process. Maybe understanding a locker room, knowing what to say and not caring what the rest of us think is the foundation of a winning strategy.
At some point in the coming weeks, Pickett is going to find himself buried by questions about suspect throws, mounting turnovers or some kind of notable rookie error. And he won’t have to side-eye social media to worry about what his coach is saying about it. In the NFL, the term for that is good coaching.
